- Chris Krebs, the former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, gave a new interview in which he said that almost all of the ballots cast in the 2020 election had a paper trail and that there was no evidence the machines were hacked or manipulated.
- In a “60 Minutes” interview that aired Sunday on CBS, Krebs reiterated previous statements he made about the election being the “most secure in American history.”
- “The proof is in the ballots,” he said. “The recounts are consistent with the initial count. If there was an algorithm that was flipping votes or changing votes, it didn’t work.”
The former top US cybersecurity official ousted by President Donald Trump said in a new interview that there was no evidence voting machines were hacked or manipulated in the 2020 election.
In a “60 Minutes” interview that aired on CBS on Sunday, Chris Krebs, the former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, reiterated previous statements he’d made about the election’s security, saying the vast majority of the ballots cast in the 2020 election had a paper trail.
“Ninety-five percent of the ballots cast in the 2020 election had a paper record associated with it,” he said. “Compared to 2016, about 82%.”
Krebs, who previously called the 2020 election the “most secure in American history,” said paper ballots were key to a secure election, as they allowed the votes to be recounted to ensure an accurate result.
“That gives you the ability to prove that there was no malicious algorithm or hacked software that adjusted the tally of the vote,” he said.
Krebs, who was appointed by Trump, was fired by the president after publicly defending the election’s security.
Trump and his allies have repeatedly claimed without evidence that voting software “flipped” millions of votes from Trump to Joe Biden. One company, Dominion Voting Systems, has been a focus of conspiracy theories.
Krebs pointed to Georgia, where the state’s hand recount confirmed the results initially tabulated by machines. He said he believed those consistent results debunked sensational claims that the election was hacked.
“That tells you that there was no manipulation of the vote on the machine-count side,” he said.
Asked by the “60 Minutes” correspondent Scott Pelley about many of the claims — including that votes were counted abroad or that foreign actors interfered — Krebs called them all “farcical.”
“The proof is in the ballots,” he said. “The recounts are consistent with the initial count. If there was an algorithm that was flipping votes or changing votes, it didn’t work.”
In a tweet on Sunday, Trump wrote, “60 Minutes never asked us for a comment about their ridiculous, one sided story on election security, which is an international joke.”
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